Book Rating (3)

Narrator Rating (2)

The Raising: A Novel

Unabridged Audiobook

Publisher: Blackstone Audiobooks

Date: March 2011

Duration: 18 hours 2 minutes

Summary:

The accident was tragic, yes. Bloody and horrific and claiming the life of a beautiful young sorority girl. Nicole was a straight-A student from a small town. Sweet-tempered, all-American, a former Girl Scout, and a virgin. But it was an accident. And that was last year. It's fall again, a new semester, a fresh start.

Craig, who has not been charged with murder, is focusing on his classes, and also on avoiding Nicole's sorority sisters, who seem to blame him for her death even though the police did not.

Perry, Craig's roommate, is working through his own grief (he grew up with Nicole, after all, and had known her since kindergarten) by auditing Professor Polson's sociology class: Death, Dying, and the Undead.

Mira has been so busy with her babies two of them, twins, the most perfect boys you could imagine but still a nearly impossible amount of work even with Clark's help that she can barely keep herself together to teach (Death, Dying and the Undead), let alone write the book she'll need to publish for tenure.

And Shelly, who was the first person at the scene of the accident, has given up calling the newspapers to tell them that, despite the 'lake of blood' in which they keep reporting the victim was found, the girl Shelly saw that night was not bloody, and not dead.

Genres:

Marie R

This book started off slow, and I wanted to like it a lot more than I ultimately did. The novel shows a lot of initial promise, and I'd hoped it would develop into something that made sticking with it through the beginning worthwhile. For a few chapters, it seemed like it would, but ultimately it fell very flat. The characters are mostly archetypal with little real personality of their own, which made developing sympathy (and thus, investment in their fortunes) for any of them challenging, and I ended up feeling a strangely uncomfortable sense that the author strongly disliked the demographics of young people and career women that she chose as her primary subjects. A lugubrious and improbable plot that stretched my suspension too far ended in the kind of anti-resolutions that I feel many more mainstream/lit-type authors find themselves falling into. As if they see themselves as "taking on" "genre tropes" in order to "elevate them" and get too focused on making statements of one kind or another, maybe about life, maybe about storytelling, but miss the mark a bit on both. There's a variety of really interesting ideas in here, but at the end of the day (and the often-tedious 18 hours of listening) I wished the author had offered the same degree of respect and interest in all of what she chose to write about as the few subjects that really shone through as having been thoughtfully researched and integrated.